Tagged with 'free'

Want an easy way to hear what all your competitors are talking about? Think of the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki as a dedicated channel for listening in on what they are saying and what customers are saying back. It’s also a good place to get free advice on what makes a good company blog and what doesn’t.

The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki started as an idea of Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson back in 2005. He wondered why some companies were blogging and some weren’t. One theory he and fellow tech expert Doc Searls were toying with was if companies started blogging as a last ditch effort to save a sinking ship. So they began compiling a list of Fortune 500 company blogs they defined as “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products” to compare against the companies’ previous 12-month share performance. They also wanted to see if blogging made a difference in performance moving forward. In October 2007 their wiki combined with the Fortune 500 Blog Project Wiki (“another wiki project that sought to review all the Fortune 500 companies that blog”) in an effort to expand both projects. You can read the whole story on Chris Anderson’s blog.

In the early days of the wiki a scant 4% of F500 companies were blogging. Though they still lag way behind the Inc. 500 (blogging at a rate of 39% according to a recent study), the Fortune 500 Business Blog wiki has tracked an increase to 12.8%  of F500 companies blogging by November15, 2008.

At Southwest Airlines interns are cool

So F500 companies are starting to catch up for all the obvious reasons, but their blogging approaches vary greatly. Some use lots of widgets and links to other cool tools (like twitter and flickr) and some don’t. Some get lots of comments and some get none. Some blogs even think interns are cool and let them blog right along with marketing managers and CEOs.

You might think nothing is more uncool than an F500 company. I have visions of guys in suits running around placating stock holders, too. But you might be surprised by what they are doing on their blogs and what types of communications they dispatch. It’s not all mea culpa posts about product recalls and poor customer service. Knowing what makes for good F500  blogging (if you don’t already) is a good way to know what’s good for our own blogs. After all, they remain on the F500 list for some reason.

There are lots of reasons to visit the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki that I will write about in a future post. But one of the biggest reasons is that visiting often can help you make your own blog better. It’s the only place (that I know of) where F500 blogs are viewable from one location, are always current, and are routinely reviewed by other bloggers. So you can easily pick from any of the more than 130 blogs listed (companies such as Microsoft and IBM have multiple blogs) and do some informal research.  See what pulls you in and makes you want to stay for a while. What are the posts talking about? Are they all about product-speak? Which blogs are actively engaging in conversation? What kind of feedback are they getting from your mutual (or potential) customers?

While you are on the wiki take some time to read the assembly of reviews by other bloggers. The ones I read were thoughtful, constructive, and use what reviewers call “businessandblogging.com’s methodology for reviewing companies.” Though I couldn’t find reference to the methodology on the businessandblogging.com web site, it apparently rates blogs according to ease of finding, frequency of posts, engaging and relevant writing, and perceived honesty, among other things.

A good example of one review discusses the Southwest Airlines blog, Nuts about Southwest. Not only is Southwest blogging, they are Twittering, Flickring, YouTubing, Linking In and Facebooking.

You might think that’s overkill for an airline blog. Like Tony Chung said in his article last week, “Nobody wants to read a stupid blog.” And who would read and airline blog? Apparently a lot of people. Southwest consistently has several comments on each post. So they must be doing something right. You can read a review by Mack Collier at The Viral Garden to see what else they (or you) might be doing right.

Uh, BTW, that's a dumb name

In some cases even if the company is talking, no one is talking back much. But at least they are trying to engage in the conversation. For example Johnson & Johnson’s blog, JNJ BTW (Am I the only own who thinks that’s a dumb name?) has some interesting posts, but they rarely get any comments. Is that because they rarely reply to them when they do come in? You can read a review by Richard Young on his Whole Nine Yards blog.

Fortune 500 companies couldn’t ask for better, free, feedback on their blogs than this. Really, they should have to pay for it, and maybe they will some day, but that’s not the intent of the wiki. In the meantime the rest of us can use it for our own amateur research. Being better able to see what is or isn’t working on other blogs gives us some precious insight into what may or may not work on our own.